Kristina Söderbaum

The extravagantly blonde Kristina Söderbaum, who has died aged 88, starred in 10 box-office hits in Nazi Germany directed by her husband Veit Harlan. She was the pin-up of the Wehrmacht, admired by Franco and parodied as the Lorelei. She also achieved a certain distinction as one of the few film actresses of the Third Reich who did not at some time enjoy a liaison with Josef Goebbels - a circumstance dictated as much by Veit Harlan's extreme possessiveness as by the propaganda minister's private predilection for dark-eyed brunettes. She was later tried by the Allies for war crimes.

Born in Sweden, the daughter of a chemistry professor who sat on the Nobel Prize committee, she initially studied art, but after the death of her parents, who opposed her theatrical ambitions, she went to Berlin to train for the stage under Rudolph Klein-Rogge. A minor part in the film comedy Onkel Brasig (1937) led to her discovery by Veit Harlan, an innovative and vigorous director already much favoured by Goebbels. Harlan gave her the lead in the dark and moody Jugend (1937), a sentimental drama of doomed love, and made her his third wife. Thereafter, until 1945, Söderbaum appeared exclusively in her husband's productions.

Diminutive, but amply blessed with rococo curves, cascading golden hair, violet eyes and a china-doll complexion, Kristina Söderbaum had the slightly comical look (at least in stills) of a porcine Alice Faye. On screen, glowing in Agfa colour (in use from 1941), she was the embodiment of florid Aryan girlhood, bursting with energy, spirit and gefühl .

A highly popular star, Söderbaum appealed to German audiences who could enjoy the drama of her regular defloration and death, comforted by the knowledge that this was, after all, a neutral Swedish actress - Goebbels' policy was to cast women from outside the Fatherland (and on at least one occasion from the inmates of the concentration camps) in the parts of wronged, erring or otherwise tainted women. Söderbaum drowned so frequently on film that she earned the soubriquet of Reichswasserleiche (the National Drowned Corpse).

Though most of her later films were expositions of Nazi dogma, a few played as straight romantic melodramas: Verwehte Spüren (1938) was later reworked as the Dirk Bogarde vehicle So Long At The Fair; Die Reise Nach Tilsit (also 1938) was an inferior remake of FW Murnau's Sunrise. Its premiere was notable for the abrupt exit of Magda Goebbels, who fancied she saw in the script allusions to her husband's then current affair with the Czech actress Lida Baarova. Titillated audiences were further aroused by glimpses (albeit brief and decorous) of a nude Kristina beneath a slipping mink coat in her next vehicle, Die Unsterbliche Herz (1939).

After the invasion of Poland, Goebbels commissioned Jud Süss (1940), a repulsive travesty of the sentimental Feuchtwanger novel already filmed in England in 1934. Harlan, with hideous deftness, neatly inverted the plot showing an 18th century court infiltrated and perverted by a villainous coterie of Jews who exhibit every vice and loathsome habit.

One of the few openly and insistently anti-semitic films of the period, presenting inconceivably gross racist concepts, Jud Süss was not only a huge box-office success throughout occupied Europe (especially in France), but was also used as an active instrument of the Holocaust, customarily shown in cities before Jewish deportations. After the war, Harlan and Söderbaum (once again raped and drowned in the film) pleaded, successfully, that they had worked on the film under duress.

From 1943 the Harlans were engaged in making the film Kolberg, Goebbels' obsessive riposte to Gone With The Wind (the latter having made him literally ill with envy). This massive historical epic ground to its conclusion during the final months of the war, consuming apparently unlimited resources. Two hundred thousand troops were drafted from the eastern front to appear as extras in battle scenes later cut as detrimental to civilian morale. The Third Reich had collapsed before the film could be generally released, though as a final propaganda stunt prints were parachuted into besieged cities.

After the war, Söderbaum, her husband and their two sons were apprehended by the Allies at Hamburg as they attempted to reach Sweden. Söderbaum received a five-year ban on working, while Veit Harlan was tried for complicity in war crimes. After a sensational year-long trial he was acquitted. Making the somewhat unlikely claim that she had declined offers of film work from around the world, Söderbaum then chose to tour provincial Germany in a play written pseudonymously by her husband. The deception was unsuccessful: her appearance provoked hate mail, demonstrations and death threats from former fans.

Like many of her contemporaries, Söderbaum continued to appear - an anachronistic if still youthful curiosity - in a few inferior German films during the 1950s. Veit Harlan refused to hear of his wife abandoning the screen, but following his death in 1964 she began a second and modestly successful career as a photographer. Latterly, she lived and worked in Munich.

In interviews, Söderbaum appeared maternal, tranquil and benign, if none too bright. She displayed little awareness of the past and the rather grotesque nature of her career; neither did she react with the agitated defensiveness of some of her contemporaries (one thinks, for example, of Zarah Leander - another Swede - and the film-maker Leni Riefenstahl).

Söderbaum converted to Roman Catholicism in the early 1960s. She is survived by two sons.

 Kristina Söderbaum, actress, born September 5 1912; died February 12 2001